Hema Sunder

Posts Tagged ‘VeriSign’

The cost increases are necessary to pay for the increased volume of domain name system queries, the company asserts.

The Internet is about to get more expensive, without justification some believe. VeriSign (VRSN), the company that manages both .com and .net domain name registration, said Thursday that the registry fees for domain names will increase starting Oct. 15.

The registry fee for domain names — effectively the wholesale price — will rise from $6 to $6.42 for .com names and from $3.50 to $3.85 for .net names. This represents the first registry fee increase since the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) established the fee structure in 1999.

Elsewhere, domain prices are going down. Last month, the government-backed China Internet Network Information Center said it would reduce domain name fees for English-language .cn names to 13 cents.

According to Shanghai Daily, the purpose of the promotional price drop is to increase use of the .cn domain and to enhance national information security, a reference presumably to the risk of dependence on overseas domain name servers.

VeriSign said the cost increase is necessary to pay for the increased volume of domain name system queries it handles — up from 1 billion queries a day in 2000 to 30 billion queries in 2007 — and to fortify the Internet’s infrastructure against cyberattacks.

Not everyone buys that explanation, however. “If you look at what Web hosting went for in 2000, compared to what it costs today, the amount of space and transfer limits for a typical account have grown far higher than thirty-fold, and at the same time prices have gone down,” said George Kirikos, president of Canadian financial software company Leap of Faith Financial Services, in a post on CircleID.com, an Internet policy discussion site.